William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
We have a few things in common—smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house.
(To photographer Juergen Teller) ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
I am at war with the obvious.
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You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
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I don’t have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn’t do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.
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I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.
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Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other.
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Everything [in a photograph] works, or nothing works.
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I never think of [a photograph] beforehand. When I get there, something happens and in a split second the pictures emerges.
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